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Bummers & Gummers
How well do you know your neighbors? Do you know their names? What do they do for a living? Are you aware of any odd habits? Do you know if they possess lethal weapons? Do you like them? Tolerate them? Or do you actively plot their death? How about your friends? How well do you know them really? Do you respect them? Or are they your friends largely for your own convenience? Friends are, ultimately, optional. You can make them or lose them as you wish. You can work on bettering your relationship with some while neglecting to write to others until they move and you don't know where they are anymore.
But neighbors
Neighbors are more like family than most people care to realize. You may or may not have anything in common with them. You may clash with some so badly that the sight of them makes you twitchy. But you are stuck with those neighbors for as long as you live in that particular spot.ฉ With that in mind, don't you think you ought to know them a little better? What if they're dangerous? Or, what if they spend a lot of their time doing things that are helpful to you but you never notice? If they're foreign to you, let's say they're Asian, shouldn't you not call them Japanese when they're really Cambodian and don't look at all Japanese? Do you care if you regularly do something that offends them deeply? Puts their lives at risk?
My nearest visible neighbors are the ghost spiders. Never before have I lived in a place with so many of them. I don't know them well enough to remember their scientific name, but I like them enough to call them by this affectionate one. Ghost spiders are the thin-bodied, long-legged, gray-brown spiders that are very fond of shower stalls. In my house, besides the obligatory one in the shower, there's a ghost spider in every corner and whole families in some. There's a particularly large and ostentatiously successful one who lives at the base of the toilet: the area around her domicile is always decked out with spent carcasses, like someone displaying on the front of their house their fine collection of antlers.
My little gray neighbors spend most of their energy doing me favors: eating (drinking really) ants, fruit flies, gnats, and other bugs with whom I have a less amicable relationship. I spend almost all my time not noticing them or their work. But when I do interact with them, I try to be considerate. When I go to fill the bath and find there's a ghost spider in there, I scoop it out and put it somewhere where it won't get splashed. (These guys look so frail it seems they could drown in drop of water.) When I'm tidying up I might remove their webs which often could do with refreshing anyway (too much dust and they lose their stickiness) but I leave the spiders behind. Sometimes, though, I'm in such a hurry that I can't be bothered to give them the time of day and whoosh! one or two get sucked down the nozzle of the old Compac.
I would say that the way I treat my nearest neighbors is typical of how I treat all my neighbors: I can be brusque, ignorant, and outright rude, often while maintaining the belief that I am a reasonably caring and considerate person. From there I conjectured that how each of us treats our friends (friends being all living things, including plants, that we choose to have around us or whom we enjoy having around us) and how we treat our neighbors all those beings who happen to be around us whether we want them or not is the pattern for how we deal with everybody, out and out, in ever widening circles, all the way to what sorts of international relations we believe are just and practicable. I'm willing to bet that people who think they can bomb the bugs in their house out of existence without consequently poisoning themselves and their family also think that the country they're a part of can nuke people on the other side of the world without any repercussions falling like rain, perhaps? upon them. When I first set to shaping this introductory essay, I thought of saying something like "your environment starts on the other side of your skin." Because for so many people "the environment" seems to be somewhere "out there" quite a ways out there something that they go visit, rampage around in, or try to protect. But I couldn't very well write that, because once you bring the environment back from the abstract, out there, you notice that it has no beginning place, unless that is, for each of us, the ground-zero center of our being. Because what's on the other side of our skin is at every moment penetrating that semi-permeable membrane. Or rushing in to fill the twin voids within us. And creeping its way on a transformational spelunking adventure through our guts until much of it crosses some barely there barrier and embarks on another thrill ride through our blood streams. While all along, we, the discreet and individual entities that we tend to think we are, are off-gassing and evaporating into our environment, returning deposits on the borrowed goods we have ingested periodically, while in rare thoughtful moments, maybe, wondering what we will do (ask to be done) with the remainder.
I mean, take a look at yourself. You're a bag of mostly water, some air, and a few handfuls of rock. Where did it come from? It came from "out there." So there is no "out there" out there. It's all right here, in microcosm, in the person that is you. You have incorporated into the fabric of your being some of the radiation from Chernobyl. Maybe you've already incorporated as well a little of the radiation from those uranium-clad "bunker busters" the U.S. government so easily exploded all over Iraq. You quite likely have knit into your bones a bit of ash from the millions of incinerated animals in England who contracted hoof-and-mouth disease in 2001. The water in your body has swirling around in it (and the tests have been conducted that prove this one) genetically and hormonally disruptive atrazine฿ from the farms of the Midwest, regardless of whether you ever ate food from there.
Then there's always that old saying about each of us containing an atom or two of Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. What we think and feel about our neighbors and friends is crucial to everyone. Uncountable lives hang in the balance. Because what we think and feel breaks free of our heads and hearts to burst into the world as what we do. As members of the (supposedly) ruling nation of the (arguably) ruling species on this planet, it is usually the lives of the others other people, other species that are annihilated. But by the unbreachable laws of interconnectedness, those others are part of our environment just as we are part of theirs.
What we do, then, comes back around to touch us as surely as the effects of imaginary lines in the sand drawn by some French or Englishmen nearly 100 years ago have resounded ever since with war, poverty, desolation, two fallen skyscrapers, and more.ฎ What we think and feel is most easily shaped by what we know, be that knowledge fact or fiction. Fiction can be satisfying or dangerous, but true knowledge is power, and a doorway to understanding. Returning from the overwhelmingly wide world to neighbors near at hand, I found that a little knowledge, scattershot at that, allowed me to release anxieties I had held for years and that came originally from prejudice.
You see, I used to be frightened of wasps. One of my salient childhood memories was of the bush at the corner of my parents' house that attracted wasps. I used to walk or run wide arcs around that blasted bush and secretly longed for its demise. As an adult I was still scared of wasps until I moved to the country. Here I started to get to know them better. I learned that many wasp species are non-aggressive. (If I am remembering correctly the shape of the wasps that used to come to the "wasp bush," they were one of those peaceful species.) Beyond that, I also learned I could press hundreds of gallons of apple cider surrounded by clouds of the "aggressive" wasps known as Yellow Jackets and not get stung unless I got careless as to where I was putting my hands. I discovered that most times of the year the famously nasty Bald-Faced Hornet has better things on her mind than attacking me. As for that season when she's feeling grouchiest, I still have the power to maintain a pre-emptive peace by being vigilantly aware of my surroundings and thereby avoiding invasions into her territory.
During the summer of the plague of flies (b&g no. 3), I learned that Bald-Faced Hornets were quite handy to have around sometimes. I happened to be present when a one flew in the French window, grabbed a fly straight out of the air, and flew back out. (At the time I thought, Hey, come back! And bring all your sisters and daughters!) That's a single example from many of how even scraps of knowledge about the entities I co-exist with give me power and security. Knowledge about the lives and doings of my neighbors and friends also gives me joy, and makes the most mundane parts of my life more interesting. I get a spark of delight from noticing when I hang the laundry that fine layers of wood are being deftly peeled off my clothes pegs. "Someone's been eating my clothes pegs!" I exclaimed, when I first saw this. Ronan, then three, shot me a concerned look of "it wasn't me." "Do you know who it was?" I asked her, "Wasps!" I get a kick out of watching the water boatmen, who always seem to find Ronan's wading pool the day after it's filled, breathe through their butts. I'm pleased to know that a peacock can be adopted into a flock of wild turkeys. (Does he get lots of hens? Are the toms jealous of his display? Or do they all think of him tolerantly as that loud-mouthed crackpot who dresses funny but comes to all their parties?) And picking up a gopher snake or an alligator lizard without causing it to feel upset or defensive can easily be the highpoint of a day. Conjecturing again from my own experience, I like to think we all (not just humans) can live more peaceful, secures lives and experience more joy and adventure the more we humans know about our neighbors and the more we understand our friends. (Who would refuse to have to have more joy in their life?)
And every living thing on the planet has at least this one thing in common with all others: each wants the world to be a place where it and future generations of it can flourish. With each essay of "Neighbors & Friends," we'll meet some creature, plant, or possibly a rock that shares our near environment or is a part of our everyday lives. I'll state right here at the outset of these explorations that I don't claim to be a naturalist. I'm learning as I go, as usual, and also as usual I can't help sharing what I've discovered (that's why I produce a zine), especially when I presume that I can do it in an amusing or enlivening way. In b&g last issue, you may have read the story "An Afternoon of Shooting Stars," which was about two wildflower acquaintances of mine. I should have had this introduction ready for that article. But I didn't like what I had written then (none of it survived to become part of this essay), and in the meantime the pages filled and time ran out.
Consider this introductory essay retroactive to that one. This issue's episode is an old story, the first coherent thing I'd written since 1996. At the time, somewhere mid-2000, reviving b&g was a dream I thought dead and buried, so I started working on a nature column I could submit to "real" magazines. I tell you that mostly to explain why Ronan is two is the story when I've mentioned elsewhere in this zine that she's five, and also to say that my relationship with my neighbors with exoskeletons has improved since then (I could be ready for that terrarium of scorpions now).
Currently I expect the stories in this series to be about neighbors and friends in b&g's bioregion. However, everyone is welcome to submit stories for "Neighbors and Friends," and many readers live in climatically different places near and far. The world, being mostly water and fluid rock, is a mutable place; I try to keep b&g fluid, too.
Here's something for the Miss Muffets among us to think about: You are never more than three feet away from a spider. Better yet, if you stand on a one-acre plot of rough grassland in mild weather, you may be sharing that acre with more than two million spiders. As I contemplated this article early one morning, I had a quick look around and concluded that I was at least a comfortable seven feet away from the tiny black spider on the ceiling above the bed. But shortly that little spider was joined by a larger one. Now, according to spider survey statistics, was I seven feet away from two spiders or three and a half feet away from one spider? Were there any spiders closer to me under the bed? Very probably, but I didn't check. Some people have gone to extremes to find their nearest spiders. One Major Hingston collected a number of Jumping Spiders at 22,000 feet on Mount Everest in the 1920s. He remarked:
There was no sign of any other small creature at 22,000 feet, at this altitude all kinds of plant life had been left behind thousands of feet below. Finding the spiders by turning over stones was a great labor, partly on account of the exhaustion experienced at this altitude and partly because the stones were all frozen to the ground.
It was later discovered that these spiders were not there by rum luck or happenstance. They homestead the heights of Everest, harvesting for their sustenance even smaller critters blown up the mountain's sides from far below. This makes spiders the highest dwelling animals on the planet. And it's freezing! How do they do it? What is going on with these cold-blooded virtually no-blooded little creatures that we big-brained warm-bloods do not yet understand? In surveys I read wherein devoted bug people have taken population samples at various altitudes up from the ground, the animal found highest in the sky was not some winged insect, it was a spider at three miles up. (Even in an airplane, you may still be within three feet of a spider!) Was it blown off course ballooning to a new location, as the baby spiders did in Charlotte's Web? Or was it on course for greater things? Since they don't mind being cold and they can go for very long periods without food, water, or, seemingly, oxygen, could spiders make it to other planets? I was thrilled to learn that morel mushroom spores were found in space, but now I wonder what all else is alive out there, beating us at our own game of space exploration. Almost all spiders go ballooning as babies. (Next time you're out on a warm autumn day prime ballooning time and you happen to notice the gossamer strands wafting aloft, glinting in the sun, you can contemplate how a few of those babies going by you might just be little 'Widows. Bot don't worry, they're to small to be able bite you as well as being nearly white at that age.) Small spiders will balloon all their lives whenever they get the itch to move on. As spiders are usually characterized by writers as fearful and retiring creatures (most species have pretty poor vision, too), a timid person wishing to be brave and adventuresome could hardly find a better totem to contemplate for courage than a spider. The first colonizer of Krakatoa, after the island experienced the most violent volcanic event in remembered human history, was a spider. It got there well in time to be discovered (and disparaged) by the first scientist to make it to post-eruption Krakatoa, in 1884. That scientist reported:
Notwithstanding all my searches, I was unable to observe any symptoms of animal life. I only discovered one microscopic spider only one; this strange pioneer of the renovation was busy spinning its web. Krakatoa, by the way, is at least 25 miles of open ocean away from any other land. But that's nothing for a spider, they've been found 1000 miles away from land. Besides getting everywhere on earth ahead of us, Everest isn't the only place spiders live that we can only visit. Underwater domiciles for humans still exist only in speculative fiction, and even if you count submarines, the European Water Spider (a.k.a. the Diving Bell Spider, Argyroneta Aquatica) colonized the water way ahead of us and is still the only air-breathing terrestrial animal to eat, mate, hatch out babies, and live for months at a stretch under water. In the case of the Diving Bell Spider, current evolution theory runs aground and I can only stand in awe and wonder what spirit of innovation, mutation, or what-have-you, would cause a spider to decide it could use its silk to spin a chamber that it would then fill with air carried down in bubbles stuck to its belly and leg hairs. What great advantage was achieved over their previous existence by carving a niche surrounded by lots of big fish who don't ever have to venture to surface? Any spider's life, not just that original Diving Bell Spider, is full of decision-making challenges that defy the pervasive (but increasingly obviously fatuous) knee-jerk perception of instinct. According to John Parrott, the volunteer with the Lane County OSU Extension Service who handles spider questions, most spider bites are "dry bites," meaning that the spider, although surprised and scared enough to bite as a knee-jerk response, was also able to decide at the last nanosecond that a human was too big a creature to waste venom on. (Aside from the particularly venomous spiders, problems with spider bites are often caused by sloppy eating on the spider's part; you can get a secondary infection from bacteria on the spider's mouth parts.) Spiders are known to decide quite often that large, stinging, or otherwise troublesome insects are a bad risk and will carefully cut such creatures out of their webs rather than expend time, energy, and silk on an enterprise that won't pay off well. So with that in mind, what made two spiders in a cellar in Elgin, Illinois, decide they could take on a six-inch garter snake who got entangled in their web? Whatever their motivation, the spiders judged the situation correctly. Not only were they successful in bagging a creature more than 350 times their size, but they were also able to liquefy the garter snake's insides sufficiently to drink them. This dynamic duo also had an unusual sense of cooperation for members of an order comprised largely of loners. The female made an excellent choice when she decided to let her mate hang around awhile. I hope you are full of wonder and appreciation for spiders now, especially if you don't much care for them. For myself, I'm glad I've (mostly) overcome a childhood fear of spiders. My dad does not have to come and dispatch any spiders in the house with a Kleenex box. And I don't either. These days, I have a live-and-let-live policy with spiders and insects within limits. Now I'm not pointing any fingers here, but the fear of spiders is usually acquired from one's parents. For my part, I'm trying not to pass on any of my own residual unease to my daughter. Later the same morning, I was perusing one of the books on spiders I had checked out of the library while I ate breakfast. My two-year-old daughter, Ronan, soon interrupted my reading, wanting to look at the pictures in the book. As we flipped through the pages, she ooh-ed and ahh-ed, declared several particularly pretty, asked the names of all of them, and patted most of the photos, which were enlargements bulging with multiple eyes and hairy legs. I noticed I was feeling a little repulsed at her friendliness. Maybe it was a parental protection instinct, as some of the pictures were of black widows and scorpions. Whatever it was, I did my best to ignore it; I would like Ronan to evolve past me on every level, including my level of reserved admiration for spiders and bugs. I realize I may live to regret that wish. While I know at least one perfectly safe way to pick up a scorpion, it doesn't mean I'm ready for a terrarium full of them in the house. While many of us may feel a bit like Miss Muffet at times (whether we admit it or not), I think we can all be thankful that we were not, actually, Miss Muffet. The poor girl had outstandingly good reasons to be leery of spiders. Although it's likely she got her fear of spiders from her father, it was not in any way you might expect. It is generally assumed that the real Miss Muffet was one Miss Patience Muffet, daughter of the Reverend Doctor Thomas Muffet (1553-1604). Papa Muffet authored one of the first scientific books on bugs and spiders, Insectorum Theatrum (The Theatre of Insects). Thomas Muffet didn't just like spiders. He was an arachnophile a lover of spiders. He encouraged house spiders to flourish in his home he thought their cobwebs made fine decorations and he described the species with an affection that borders on the
well, you'll see:
as if Nature had appointed not only to make it round, like the Heavens, but with rays, like the stars, as if [stars] were alive. The skin of it is so soft, smooth, polished and neat, that she precedes the softest skind Mayds, and the daintiest and most beautiful strumpets. She hath fingers that the most gallant virgins desire to have theirs like them, long, slender, round, of exact feeling.
Who would not admire so great force, so sharp and hard bitings, and almost incredible strength in so small a body
? This cannot proceed from its body but from its spirit; or rather God Himself. So, besides that poor Miss Muffet must have lived in a house crawling with spiders, it is also known that Dr. Muffet was keen on treating his daughter with spiders to cure many ailments. Take this, for example: "The running of the eyes is stopped with the dung and urine of the House Spider dropt in with Oyl of Roses, or laid on alone with Wooll." Yikes! No wonder Miss Muffet quit her tuffet in haste.
P.S. Want to take your relationship with spiders up a notch? Talk to John Parrott (Lane County Extension Service 541-682-4243). He loves to talk about spiders and is on friendly terms with the Black Widows in his house. John will probably tell you that Jumping Spiders can be fun to interact with and that there are no documented cases of a Jumping Spider ever biting a person. This makes Jumpers good company for people wishing to learn to relax around spiders. Jumpers, being what they are, have keen vision, not only can they see you clearly but if you get on their level you can look into each other's eyes, which may be a rare moment in cross-species relations. (When was the last time you looked deeply into the eyes of a member phylum Arthropoda?) Jumping spiders can be taught to take flies from people they know (if you want to do this, the flies need to be still kicking) and will even play peek-a-boo around a coffee cup or plant pot. Some arachnophiles when they find a pair of Jumpers, will put them in a shoebox or on a platform for a little while so that they can watch the spiders' courtship dance. The Extension Service is also a good place to take spiders should you need to have one identified. It's best if the specimen is alive. If that isn't possible, put the corpse in a small jar of rubbing alcohol to preserve it.
P.P.S. For those of you hungry to learn more about your eight-legged neighbors, I recommend these two books: The Book of the Spider by Paul Hillyard, and Life of the Spider by Jean Henry Fabre. Quotes used in this article came from Hillyard's book. The incident of the garter snake (with documenting photo) is from Chapter VIII, "Our Insect Friends and Foes and Spiders, " Afield with the Spiders by Henry E. Ewing, USDA Entomologist, pp. 212 and 216.
Copyright ฉ 2003 by Lokiko Hall
About this section:
bummer and gummers is a sister publication of West By Northwest.org
What is "bummers & gummers?"
bummers & gummers" are sheepherding terms. To explore the full b&g experience subscribe to "bummers & gummers" (the full zine in print) by sending your name and address plus $10 as carefully concealed cash or a check to:
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Visit Lokiko Hall's stories at West By Northwest.org (and now "Bummers and Gummers" online at West By Northwest.org.)
Let There Be Peace: An Interview with Two Teen Peacemakers
Conversations with an Artist: Susan Applegate
The Lay Of King Henry
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